Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather

Transcription

1 THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE VOL. LVIII, NO. 3 JUNE 2003 Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather DAVID HIRSHLEIFER and TYLER SHUMWAY n ABSTRACT Psychological evidence and casual intuition predict that sunny weather is associated with upbeat mood. This paper examines the relationship between morning sunshine in the city of a country s leading stock exchange and daily market index returns across 26 countries from 1982 to Sunshine is strongly signi cantly correlated with stock returns. After controlling for sunshine, rain and snow are unrelated to returns. Substantial use of weatherbased strategies was optimal for a trader with very low transactions costs. However, because these strategies involve frequent trades, fairly modest costs eliminate the gains.these ndings are di cult to reconcile with fully rational price setting. SUNSHINE AFFECTS MOOD, as evidenced by song and verse, daily experience, and formal psychological studies. But does sunlight a ect the stock market? The traditional e cient markets view says no, with minor quali cations. If sunlight a ects the weather, it can a ect agricultural and perhaps other weatherrelated rms. But in modern economies in which agriculture plays a modest role, it seems unlikely that whether it is cloudy outside the stock exchange today should a ect the rational price of the nation s stock market index. (Even in countries where agriculture plays a large role, it is not clear that one day of sunshine versus cloud cover at the stock exchange should be very informative about harvest yield.) An alternative view is that sunlight a ects mood, and that people tend to evaluate future prospects more optimistically when they are in a good mood than when they are in a bad mood. A literature in psychology has found that mood a ects judgment and behavior. The psychological literature on sunlight, mood, and misattribution of mood is discussed in the next section. An important strand of this literature has provided evidence that mood contains valuable information n Hirshleifer is from the Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University and Shumway is from the University of Michigan Business School. We thank Aldo Rosas for his excellent research assistance. We also thank the editor, Rick Green; an anonymous referee; Andrew Ang; Michael Cooper; Joshua Coval; Bud Gibson; Marc Hulbert; Alice Isen; Daniel Kahneman; Seongyeon Lim; Barbara Mellers; Marina Murphy; Norbert Schwarz; Lu Zheng; Jason Zweig; and seminar participants at Cornell University, the Decision Sciences Consortium, and the Finance Department brown bag seminar at the University of Michigan for helpful comments. Any remaining errors are our own. 1009

2 1010 The Journal of Finance about the environment.the inferences drawn from mood can go astray however; people sometimes attribute their mood to the wrong feature of the environment. For example, someone who is in a good mood because of sunshine may unconsciously attribute this feeling to generally favorable life prospects. If such misattribution extends to investments, then stock prices will uctuate in response to the mood of investors. Furthermore, people in good moods nd positive material more salient and psychologically available than negative material.this evidence suggests that on dim, dull, dreary, depressing days stocks will decline, whereas cheery bright days will boost stocks. For three reasons, examining the e ects of sunlight on the stock market provides an attractive means of testing whether psychological biases can a ect stock returns. First, any such relationship is not subject to the criticism of data snooping. Exploration of whether this pattern exists was speci cally stimulated by the psychological hypothesisfthe hypothesis was not selected to match a known pattern. Second, such a pattern, if it exists, has a psychological explanation but no plausible rational explanation. This contrasts with many well-known patterns of stock returns for which psychological and rational explanations are currently competing.third, sunshine is an easily measured exogenous in uence. 1 Some previous work emphasizes the dynamics of the social transmission of popular sentiments and theories (see, e.g., the overview of Shiller (2000a)). Some empirical headway along these lines has been made through survey methods (see, e.g., Shiller (1990, 2000b) and Hong, Kubik, and Stein (2003)). Here, we sidestep the complexities of the process of social in uence by focusing on an exogenous external in uence. The rst test of the hypothesis that sunshine a ects returns involves examining individually for each city the relationship between daily cloudiness and daily nominal return on the nation s stock index using univariate regression at 26 stock exchanges internationally from 1982 to To ensure that the e ects we identify do not derive from well-known seasonal stock return e ects, we examine the deviation between the day s cloudiness and the ordinary expected degree of cloudiness for that day of the year.we examine the relationship of cloudiness both to continuous returns, and (in logit regressions) to the probability that the return will be positive. Depending on the speci cation, in either 18 or 25 of the 26 cities, the relationship between returns and cloudiness is negative (in most cases not signi cantly). Based on a simple nonparametric joint test, it is unlikely that these results would arise by sheer chance. These city-by-city results strongly suggest that there is a genuine relationship between stock returns and cloudiness.to examine this issue in a more structured way, we provide several joint (cross-city) parametric tests using the entire data set. In pooled regressions where the intercept and slope are constrained to be the same across cities, we nd a highly statistically signi cant relationship between 1 As Roll (1992) put it, Weather is a genuinely exogenous economic factor. y It was a favourite example of an exogenous identifying variable in the early econometrics literaturey Because weather is both exogenous and unambiguously observable y weather data should be useful in assessing the information processing ability of nancial markets.

3 Stock Returns and theweather 1011 cloud cover and returns (t ), or (w ), for the logit. However, these tests assume independent errors, which is implausible. To address this issue, we estimate a city-speci c xed e ects model with panel corrected standard errors (PCSE). Our PCSE speci cation allows errors to be contemporaneously correlated, heteroskedastic across cities and autocorrelated within each city s time series. Once again there is a highly signi cant negative relationship between cloud cover and returns (asymptotic z-statistic ). To examine the relationship of weather to the probability of a positive return, we estimate a xed e ects linear probability model with PCSE using an indicator variable that is one when returns are positive. This again yields a strongly significant relationship (t ). In all cases, adjusting for contemporaneous correlation and heteroskedasticity across panels and autocorrelation within panels has little e ect on the inference. The magnitude of the sunshine e ect is substantial. For example, for New York City, the annualized nominal market return on perfectly sunny days is approximately 24.8 percent per year versus 8.7 percent per year on perfectly cloudy days. However, from an investor s perspective, the value of these return di erentials depends on whether it is possible to diversify the risk of a sunshine-based trading strategy. We nd that for very low levels of transaction costs, trading strategies based on the weather generate statistically signi cant but economically modest improvements in portfolio Sharpe ratios. However, some countries stock indices cannot be traded cheaply, and weather strategies involve frequent trading, so for most investors, trading on the sunshine e ect does not appear to be pro table net of costs. 2 We also explore by means of multiple regression whether the e ect derives from sunshine versus cloudiness, or from other associated weather conditions such as rain or snow. We nd that sunshine remains signi cant, and that after controlling for sunshine, rain and snow are essentially unrelated to returns. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section I discusses misattribution of mood, sunshine, and stock returns. Section II describes the data we use for our analyses, while Section III reports our evidence in detail. Section IV concludes. I. Misattribution of Mood, Sunshine, and Stock Returns A. Mood, Judgment, and Decisions A literature in psychology considers how emotions and moods in uence human decision making. Individuals who are in good moods make more optimistic choices. A highly robust e ect is that individuals in good moods have more positive evaluations of many sorts, such as life satisfaction, past events, people, and consumer products (see, e.g., Wright and Bower (1992), and the survey of Bagozzi, Gopinath, and Nyer (1999)). There is a mood congruency e ect, wherein 2 Our ndings do not rule out the possibility that weekly or more complex weather-based strategies can retain high returns while further economizing on transaction costs; no doubt practitioners will explore these possibilities.

4 1012 The Journal of Finance people who are in bad moods (good moods) tend to nd negative (positive) material more available or salient (see, e.g., Isen et al. (1978) and Forgas and Bower (1987)). Mood most strongly a ects relatively abstract judgments about which people lack concrete information (Clore, Schwarz, and Conway (1994) and Forgas (1995)). Several studies have found that individuals who are in good moods engage in more use of simplifying heuristics to aid decisions (see the reviews of Bless, Schwarz, and Kemmelmeier (1996) and Isen (2000)). However, there is debate as to whether this use of heuristics re ects cognitive de ciencies associated with good moods, or more e cient use of means of simplifying complex data. Several studies have reported that bad moods tend to stimulate people to engage in detailed analytical activity, whereas good moods are associated with less critical modes of information processing (Schwarz (1990), Petty, Gleicher, and Baker (1991), and Sinclair and Mark (1995)), so that people in good moods are more receptive to weak as well as strong arguments (see Mackie and Worth (1991)). One review describes the evidence as indicating that good moods cause greater reliance on category information, and therefore more simplistic stereotyping (see Bless et al. (1996)). However, Isen (2000) points out several complexities in the interpretation of such studies owing to interacting psychological e ects. Bless et al. provide evidence that good moods cause people to rely more heavily on pre-existing knowledge structures, but do not necessarily create a general decrease in the motivation or capacity to think e ectively. Good moods have signi cant positives as well. People in good moods tend to generate more unusual associations, perform better in creative problem-solving tasks, and show greater mental exibility. In addition, people in good moods tend to elaborate more on tasks involving neutral or positive (but not negative) stimulus material (see, e.g., the review of Isen (2000)). Emotions in uence assessments both of how favorable future prospects are (see, e.g., Johnson and Tversky (1983) and Arkes, Herren, and Isen (1988)), and assessments of risk (see, e.g., the reviews of Loewenstein et al. (2001) and Slovic et al. (2002)). The direction of the in uence of mood on risk assessment is complex, and depends on the task and situation (see, e.g., the discussion of Isen (2000)). An important strand of the theory of a ective states (emotions or moods) holds that such states provide information to individuals about the environment (see, e.g., Frijda (1988) and Schwarz (1990)). 3 A substantial body of evidence supports an informational role of a ect (see, e.g., Schwarz (1990), Clore and Parrott (1991), Wilson and Schooler (1991), and Clore et al. (1994)). Indeed, a procedure of decision making based upon feelings has been called the a ect heuristic by Slovic et al. (2002). 4 3 Consistent with this view, people often talk approvingly about making decisions based on gut feelings, good or bad vibes, or doing what your heart tells you. However, ordinary conversation also includes criticism of bad judgments based on feelings ( Marry in haste, repent at leisure. ). 4 Decisions are in uenced not just by immediate feelings, but by the anticipation of future feelings; see, for example, the reviews of Mellers (2000), Loewenstein et al. (2001), and Slovic et al. (2002).

5 Stock Returns and theweather 1013 People often attribute their feelings to the wrong source, leading to incorrect judgments. As an example of this problem of misattribution, people feel happier on sunny days than on cloudy days. The e ect of sunlight on their judgments about happiness is reduced if they are primed by asking them about the weather (Schwarz and Clore (1983)). Presumably this reminds them to attribute their good mood to sunshine rather than to long-term considerations. B. Mood, Sunlight, and Behavior Psychologists have been documenting correlation between sunshine and behavior for decades. Among other things, sunshine has been linked to tipping (Rind (1996)), and lack of sunshine to depression (Eagles (1994)) and suicide (Tietjen and Kripke (1994)). Most evidence suggests that people feel better when they are exposed to more sunshine. If people are more optimistic when the sun shines, they may be more inclined to buy stocks on sunny days. Speci cally, they may incorrectly attribute their good mood to positive economic prospects rather than good weather. This suggests that sunshine is positively correlated with stock returns. Furthermore, the prediction is not that the news (as in a weather forecast) that the day will be sunny causes an immediate and complete positive stock price reaction. Rather, it is the occurrence of the sunshine itself that should cause prices to move. An alternative to the informational perspective on a ect is to view feelings as in uencing preferences. Loewenstein (1996) reviews literature on, and models how, visceral factors such as hunger, fatigue, sexual desire, moods, emotions, pain, and drug cravings a ect preferences between di erent goods. Mehra and Sah (2000) provide an analysis of the determination of stock prices when mood a ects preferences.they show that small random uctuations in preference parameters can cause signi cant volatility in prices. In contrast, if people are rational maximizers, there is little reason to conjecture that sunshine is correlated with stock returns. It is certainly likely that weather a ects economic output, particularly in industries like agriculture and construction. However, the sunshine that occurs in one particular location is not generally representative of the weather in an entire economy. Moreover, sunshine is a transitory variable.the amount of unexpected sunshine occurring today is not highly correlated with the amount that will prevail one week or one month from today. Finally, the occurrence of rain or snow should be more strongly correlated with output than cloudiness versus sunshine. Severe weather could hamper markets, communications, or other commercial activities. We therefore jointly test for the incremental e ects on stock returns of rain, snow, and sunshine. 5 5 If people derive utility from both consumption and sunshine, some slight correlation between daily stock returns and sunshine may be rationally induced. However, most rational models do not attempt to capture stocks sunshine risk.

6 1014 The Journal of Finance C. Mood, Sunlight, and Stock Prices There is already some evidence that sunshine in uences markets. Saunders (1993) shows that when it is cloudy in New York City, New York Stock Exchange index returns tend to be negative. He shows that the cloudiness/returns correlation is robust to various choices of stock index and regression speci cation. Although this nding is noteworthy, it has received little attention, possibly because of concerns about unintentional data mining. Studies that identify signi cant relationships are more likely to be published than those that nd nothing, so there will always be well-executed, published papers describing signi cant, but meaningless results. Our paper helps remedy this potential concern with respect to sunshine e ects by examining data from many exchanges and a more recent time period. Kamstra, Kramer, and Levi (2000a) use data from several countries to show that the Friday to Monday return is signi cantly lower on daylight-savings-time weekends than on other weekends. However, such changes can a ect sleep patterns, not just waking hours of sunlight. Furthermore, examining weather data allows us to exploit the full sample of daily returns instead of a sample restricted to the dates of daylight-saving-time changes. Kamstra, Kramer, and Levi (2000b) examine the e ects of seasonal shifts in length of day in ve stock markets (including markets in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres). They nd that stock market returns are signi cantly related to season, and argue that this relationship arises because of the deterministic shifts in the length of day through the seasons. They therefore suggest that deterministic variations in length of day help explain the January e ect. 6 We examine here the relationship of stock returns to a stochastic variable, the realization of the weather. We test the hypothesis that cloudy weather is correlated with poor stock returns. We do this with a sample of 26 stock exchanges. Using a panel rather than a long time series has three advantages. First, it helps identify whether the hypothesized phenomenon is pervasive. The psychological argument for the e ect of sunshine should apply globally. Second, our recent sample allows us to examine whether this phenomenon is still present in the years subsequent to Saunders (1993). If nancial markets have become more e cient over time, it is possible that the sunshine e ect found by Saunders is no longer relevant. Consistent with this notion, Saunders found that his regression does not work well in the last subperiod of his sample (1983 to 1989). However, our study nds that sunshine e ects are still present internationally and in the United States. Third, the panel increases our power to detect an e ect. Even if sunshine affects returns, we know there are many other important in uences on any given day. Most variation in returns will be driven by economic events and news. Given 6 Kramer (2000) examines another possible e ect of mood on stock prices. She describes psychological evidence of predictable swings in mood over the course of the day. In a metaanalysis of three previous empirical studies on intraday returns, Kramer argues that the evidence on intraday patterns in expected stock returns is consistent with psychological patterns of diurnal mood swings.

7 Stock Returns and theweather 1015 the high variability of returns, it is useful to maximize power by using a large number of markets. II. Data Since we want to examine whether stock returns are correlated with cloudiness, we need both stock return and weather data.we collect weather data from the International Surface Weather Observations (ISWO) data set sold by the National Climactic Data Center (http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html).the ISWO data set contains detailed descriptions of the weather at 3,000 locations worldwide from 1982 to In most ISWO locations, observations about the wind, cloud cover, and barometric pressure are collected hourly. Since the hypothesis that we examine relates stock returns to the amount of sunshine on a particular day, we collect the ISWO variable that measures total sky cover (SKC). SKC ranges from zero (clear) to eight (overcast).we calculate the average cloud cover for each day from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. local time for cities with stock exchanges.while the ISWO data appear to be of very high quality, a complete record of sky cover observations is not available for all of the cities with major stock exchanges. In particular, SKC data for Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Lisbon, Mexico City,Toronto, Jakarta, Frankfurt, and Wellington are not su ciently complete to make data from these cities usable. Of course, the daily cloud cover in any particular city is highly seasonal. For example, winter months are associated with cloudier weather in New York City. Many seasonal patterns have been identi ed in stock return data as well (e.g., Keim (1983)), and numerous possible causal forces exhibit annual seasonality. To be certain that our results are driven by cloudiness rather than other seasonal e ects, we therefore deseasonalize the cloud data. This provides a conservative measure of the e ect of cloud cover, in the sense that we exclude any contribution that cloud cover may make to seasonal return patterns. We calculate the average cloudiness value for each week of the year in each city, and deseasonalize by subtracting each week s mean cloudiness from each daily mean. For example, we calculate the average value of SKC i,t for the rst full calendar week of the year for a particular city, taking an average of 80 values (16 years times ve days in the week). Then we subtract this mean from the city s daily SKC i,t values in the rst week of each year. We denote the deseasonalized value of SKC for city i on day t as SKCit n n. The mean of SKC it is close to zero, and its global standard deviation is To check whether our results are driven by adverse weather conditions, we include measures of raininess and snowiness in some of our regression speci cations.the ISWO data set contains a number of variables that describe the current and recently passed weather at each station. We use these variables to determine whether it is raining or has rained within the last observation period at each station. We then average the number of observation periods for which rain is reported per day. We perform similar calculations for snowy weather. Finally, we deseasonalize our raininess and snowiness variables by week in the same way that we deseasonalize the SKC variable. We denote the deseasonalized

8 1016 The Journal of Finance raininess in location i on day t RAINit n and we denote our deseasonalized snow variable SNOW it n. We collect daily index returns from Datastream. All cities that have data from at least 1988 to 1997 are included in the analysis. For most cities, we use the market index calculated by Datastream (Datastream Global Index). However, for several cities, other indices exist with longer time series. Thus, we collect the following indices for the corresponding locations: Bovespa for Rio de Janeiro, IGPA for Santiago, Hex for Helsinki, Kuala Lumpur Composite for Kuala Lumpur, PSE Composite for Manila, Madrid SE General for Madrid, Taiwan SE Weighted for Taipei, and the Bangkok Composite for Bangkok. Some summary statistics for the sample appear in Table I. The cloudiness measure used to calculate the means in column 3 of Table I is the original SKC it, Table I Summary Statistics Table I displays a number of summary statistics that describe the sample. The time series for each city listed in column 1 begins in the year listed in column 2 and ends on December 31, The variable described as Cover is total sky cover, taken from the ISWO data set. Cloud cover ranges from zero to eight in any particular city at any particular time. Columns 3 and 4 report the mean and standard deviation of cloud cover in each city listed in column 1. Columns 5 and 6 report the mean and standard deviation of percentage returns in the local currency for each city. Location (1) Begin Date (2) Mean Cover (3) STD Cover (4) Mean Ret (5) STD Ret (6) Amsterdam Athens Bangkok Brussels Buenos Aires Copenhagen Dublin Helsinki Istanbul Johannesburg Kuala Lumpur London Madrid Manila Milan NewYork Oslo Paris Rio de Janeiro Santiago Singapore Stockholm Sydney Taipei Vienna Zurich

9 Stock Returns and theweather 1017 complete with its seasonal variability. It is evident from the sample statistics that some cities consistently experience more sunshine than other cities. Moreover, some cities appear to have substantially higher expected returns than other cities. This can be understood by noting that all returns are nominal returns expressed in local currencies. Some currencies, like that of Brazil, experience substantial in ation, so high nominal returns are not surprising. A correlation matrix of both deseasonalized cloudiness, SKCit n, and of daily returns appears in Table II. The cross-city correlation of returns appear below the diagonal in the table, while the cloudiness correlations are above the diagonal. While no measure of statistical signi cance is reported in the table, almost all correlations greater in absolute value than 0.04 are signi cant at the ve percent level. Not surprisingly, most of the returns correlations are positive, large, and signi cant. Only two estimated correlations are negative, and none are larger than Thus, while the global component of daily international returns is Table II Correlation Matrix Table II displays estimated cross-city correlation coe cients for the principal variables in the analysis. Correlations of deseasonalized cloudiness appear above the diagonal, while returns correlations appear below the diagonal. Almost all correlations with an absolute value greater than 0.04 are statistically signi cant. Ams Ath Ban Bru Bue Cop Dub Hel Ist Joh Kua Lon Mad Ams & Ath 0.12 & Ban & Bru & Bue & Cop & Dub & Hel & Ist & Joh & Kua & Lon & 0.01 Mad & Man Mil New Osl Par Rio San Sin Sto Syd Tai Vie Zur

10 1018 The Journal of Finance Table IIFcontinued Man Mil New Osl Par Rio San Sin Sto Syd Tai Vie Zur Ams Ath Ban Bru Bue Cop Dub Hel Ist Joh Kua Lon Mad Man & Mel 0.21 & Mil & New & Osl & Par & Rio & San & Sin & Sto & Tai & Vie & 0.29 Zur & fairly large, there is also a large local component to each national index return. We expect that cloudiness a ects the local component of an index return. Even after deseasonalizing cloudiness, there are many signi cant cross-city correlations.the cloudiness correlations appear to be determined largely by geography, with proximate cities exhibiting large correlations. The correlations in returns and cloudiness present econometric problems that our test speci cations will have to overcome. III. Evidence This section describes the statistical results of testing the hypothesis that cloudy weather is associated with low stock market returns. Our rst set of results concerns some very simple speci cations estimated city by city. Simple cityby-city speci cations give us an idea of the signi cance of cloudiness in explaining returns. However, given the relatively short time series in our sample, we cannot expect many individual city results to be statistically signi cant. Because there is a tremendous amount of variation in individual index stock returns, to increase power we perform joint tests that employ the entire panel of

11 Stock Returns and theweather exchanges.we also check whether raininess or snowiness are correlated with returns, and whether any correlation between sunshine and returns can be explained by raininess and snowiness. Finally, we examine the economic signi cance of the sunshine e ect with traditional measures similar to R 2 and with a simple trading strategy. A. City-by-City Tests We rst estimate simple regressions that are similar to those in Saunders (1993). Speci cally, we estimate the parameters of the regression equation r it ¼ a t þ b ic SKCit n þ e it ð1þ Ordinary least squares estimates of the b ic coe cient of this regression are reported in the third column of Table III, and the associated t-statistics are reported in the fourth column of Table III. The results are quite robust. Estimates that use the original cloudiness measure (SKC it ) are quite similar to those reported. Regressions that replace the cloudiness measure with a variable that is set to one when SKC it is less than one, to zero when SKC it is between one and seven, and to minus one when SKC it is greater than seven also produce very similar results. It might be conjectured that it is not just cloudiness per se, but also the change in cloudiness from the previous day that in uences moods. While regressions of returns on changes in cloudiness produce results that are similar to the levels results in Table III, the levels results are slightly stronger. When both levels and changes are included in the regression, the levels remain signi cant but the changes coe cient becomes insigni cant. The simple regression coe cients in Table III already give an idea of the global signi cance of cloudiness for returns. Four of the negative estimated coe cients are signi cantly di erent from zero using a two-tailed, ve percent test. However, Saunders (1993) argues that a one-tailed test is appropriate, since the alternative hypothesis being examined concerns only the left tail. Using a one-tailed, ve percent test, 7 of the 26 coe cients are statistically signi cantly negative. In contrast, the largest positive t-statistic is We can examine the joint signi cance of these results with some simple nonparametric calculations. The coe cient on SKCit n, reported in column 3, is positive for 8 out of 26 cities. If the sign of each regression is an independent draw from the binomial distribution, and if the probability of drawing a negative coef- cient is 0.5, then the probability of nding only 8 positive coe cients out of 26 possible is This is within the ve percent level of signi cance for a onetailed test. The simple regression coe cients reported in Table III suggest that cloudiness and returns are correlated. However, the simple regressions may not be the most powerful way to examine our hypothesis.the simple regressions relate the level of returns on any given day to the percentage of cloud cover on that particular day.thus, while a fairly cloudy day (SKC it 5 6) may be associated with negative index returns, a very cloudy day (SKC it 5 8) should be associated with very negative returns according to the sim-

13 Stock Returns and theweather 1021 by maximum likelihood.the fth column of Table III reports the estimates of g ic. The sixth and seventh columns of Table III report each coe cient s chi-square test of statistical signi cance and its associated p-value. While only four of the simple regression coe cients are statistically signi cant in the ve percent, two-tailed test, ve of the logit coe cients are signi cant at this level. Furthermore, nine of the coe cients are signi cant at the 10 percent level, or equivalently, in a one-tailed test. Again, no positive estimate of g ic is even close to signi cant. In fact, 25 out of 26 estimated g ic coe cients are negative. Performing the same calculation as before, if each of the signs of the g ic was independently binomial ( p 5 0.5), the probability of this occuring would be This is quite strong evidence that cloudiness is correlated with returns. Moreover, the chi-share test statistic for the NewYork logit regression is highly statistically signi cant, with an associated p-value of This is a notable contrast with the nding of Saunders (1993) that the sunshine e ect is insigni cant in the last subperiod of his sample (1983 to 1989). Saunders concluded that the sunshine e ect may be of purely historical interest. Splitting the New York logit regression into similar subperiods, the logit coe cient estimate calculated with our data for the eight-year period from 1982 to 1989 is with an associated chisquare statistic of 0.68 (p-value ). However, the logit coe cient estimate for the eight-year period from 1990 to 1997 is with an associated chisquare statistic of (p-value ). Thus, although we replicate Saunders nding that the weather e ect was weak in the 1980s, the sunshine e ect appears most strongly in New York during the 1990s. Because of sampling noise, eight years is a short period of time to measure these e ects. Thus, the results are not inconsistent with a stable sunshine e ect through the entire period. B. Joint Tests While the city-by-city results reported above strongly suggest that stock returns are correlated with cloudiness, we can use the entire data set to make more de nitive statements about the statistical signi cance of the cloudiness e ect. We report the results of several joint (across cities/indices) tests of signi cance in this section. The rst joint tests can be considered simple generalizations of the regressions described above. We estimate one regression with the simple speci cation of equation (1) with all of the data from each city.we refer to this as a pooled regression. In particular, we estimate a pooled regression of the form r it ¼ a þ b C SKCit n þ e it; ð3þ where now the parameters a and b C are constrained to be the same across markets. In this simple pooled speci cation, we assume that the error terms, e it,are i.i.d. This speci cation does not adjust for any contemporaneous correlations across the error terms of di erent indices, nor does it adjust for any autocorrelation among a particular index s errors. Contemporaneous correlation across index-speci c error terms almost certainly exists, given the correlations in Table II.

14 1022 The Journal of Finance The results of the simple pooled regression appear in the penultimate line of Table III. The b C coe cient estimate is 0.011, which is approximately the mean of the city-by-city estimates. The associated t-statistic is 4.49, which is highly statistically signi cant. We also perform a pooled test with the logit model described by equation (2). Again, we simply concatenate the data from each city, resulting in one sample of 92,808 observations, 53.2 percent of which are positive. The estimate of g c is 0.02, approximately the mean of the city-by-city results. Moreover, the chisquare test of statistical signi cance is 43.62, which is very statistically signi cant. However, these test statistics are also based on the dubious assumption that each observation is i.i.d. To allow for violations of the assumption that each error term is i.i.d., we estimate a city-speci c xed e ects model of the form r it ¼ a i þ b C SKC n it þ e it; ð4þ with panel corrected standard errors (PCSE). Our PCSE speci cation allows e it to be contemporaneously correlated and heteroskedastic across cities, and autocorrelated within each city s time series. We estimate b C to be with an associated asymptotic z-statistic of These estimates are quite close to the naive pooled estimates discussed above, so adjusting for the correlations in the panel data does not reduce the power of the inference very much. Adjusting the logit model for panel correlations is signi cantly more complicated than adjusting the simple regression. Therefore, we estimate a xed e ects linear probability model with PCSE of the form Iðr it 40Þ ¼a P;i þ b P SKCit n þ e it; ð5þ where I(r it 40) is an indicator variable that is one when returns are positive. Estimating this regression yields an estimate of b P of with an associated t- statistic of Again, adjusting for contemporaneous correlation and heteroskedasticity across panels and autocorrelation within panels has little e ect on the inference. The sunshine e ect has been criticized by Trombley (1997) on the grounds that the results documented for New York weather and returns in Saunders (1993) are not statistically signi cant in each month of the year and subperiod of the data (a criterion which we regard as inappropriate). Trombley also nds that average returns do not appear to be a monotonic function of cloudiness in Saunders data. In unreported tests that employ our entire panel of data, we nd that average returns are almost monotonically decreasing in cloudiness and that the e ect of cloudiness on returns is negative in all 12 months of the year and signi cantly negative in one-sided tests in 6 of the 12 months. Overall, our nding that sunshine is statistically signi cantly correlated with daily returns appears quite robust. C. Controlling foradverseweather As discussed above, it is possible that sunshine is just a proxy variable for other weather conditions, such as lack of rain or snow, that may be correlated with

15 Stock Returns and theweather 1023 stock returns.we examine this hypothesis by measuring raininess and snowiness and including adverse weather conditions in the regressions. The regressions that we estimate and report in Table IV take the form r it ¼ a i þ b ic SKCit n þ b irrainit n þ b issnowit n þ e it; ð6þ where the variables are measured as de ned in Section II. Table V reports estimates of logit models analogous to those described in the previous subsection. The results in Tables IVand V indicate that the sunshine e ect is not explained by other weather conditions. In Table IV, only 9 of the 26 sky cover coe cients reported in column 2 are positive. In the regressions without raininess and snowiness (in Table III), 8 of the coe cients are positive. Similar to the regressions Table IV Sunshine Regressions Controlling for Other Weather Conditions This table displays city-by-city and pooled results of estimating a regression of daily stock returns on cloudiness, raininess, and snowiness. Column 2 contains the coe cient estimate for cloudiness, and column 3 contains the associated t-statistic. Columns 4 and 5 contain coe cient estimates for raininess and snowiness. An asterisk indicates statistical signi cance at the ve percent level or greater. Location (1) b ic t-statistic b ir b is Amsterdam Athens Bangkok Brussels n Buenos Aires Copenhagen Dublin Helsinki Istanbul Johannesburg Kuala Lumpur London Madrid Manila Milan n NewYork n Oslo Paris Rio de Janeiro n Santiago Singapore Stockholm Sydney Taipei Vienna n Zurich All cities (naive) n All cities (PCSE) n

16 1024 The Journal of Finance TableV Sunshine Logit Models Controlling for Other Weather Conditions This table displays city-by-city and pooled results of estimating a logit model that relates the probability of a positive daily stock return to cloudiness, raininess, and snowiness. Column 2 contains the coe cient estimate for cloudiness, and column 3 contains the associated w 2 -statistic. Columns 4 and 5 contain coe cient estimates for raininess and snowiness. An asterisk indicates statistical signi cance at the ve percent level or greater. Location (1) g ic (2) w2(3) g ir (4) g is (5) Amsterdam Athens Bangkok Brussels n Buenos Aires Copenhagen Dublin Helsinki n Istanbul Johannesburg Kuala Lumpur London Madrid Manila Milan NewYork n n Oslo Paris n Rio de Janeiro Santiago Singapore Stockholm Sydney Taipei Vienna n Zurich n All cities (naive) n n without raininess and snowiness, 3 of the coe cients are signi cantly negative at the ve percent level, but none of the coe cients is close to signi cantly positive. By comparison, raininess and snowiness have 12 and 13 positive estimated coe cients in columns 4 and 5, respectively. Two of the raininess and 1 of the snowiness coe cients are statistically signi cant. While the city-by-city results in Table IV suggest that the sunshine e ect is independent of raininess and snowiness, we can design more powerful tests of the adverse weather explanation by considering all cities returns jointly.the last two lines of Table IV report the results of an all city pooled regression and a xede ects PCSE regression analogous to those regressions described in the previous subsection. In both regressions, the coe cient on sky cover is signi cantly negative, with t-statistics of 3.94 and However, raininess and snowiness are

17 economically and statistically insigni cant in both speci cations. Overall, the results of Table IV do not support the other-weather-condition explanation of our results. The binary results in Table V are not favorable to the adverse weather hypothesis either. As in the previous section, the logit model estimates reported in Table V relate the sign of the return in city i on day t to the weather in that city on that day. Speci cally, the models we estimate are of the form Pðr it 40Þ ¼ eg icskc n it þg irrain n it þg issnow n it 1 þ e g icskc n it þg irrain n it þg issnow n it : ð7þ i;t i;t Stock Returns and theweather 1025 Looking at the city-by-city results, only 4 of the sky cover coe cient estimates reported in column 2 are positive, while 4 of the estimates are signi cantly negative. While 3 of the raininess coe cients reported in column 4 are signi cantly negative, 12 of the raininess coe cients are positive. None of the snowiness coef- cients in column 5 is signi cant, and 16 of them are positive. The city-by-city logit results con rm that sunny days tend to coincide with positive returns. To assess the joint signi cance of the city-by-city logit estimates, we again estimate a naive pooled logit model and a xed-e ects PCSE linear probability model. The results of the pooled logit model appear in the nal row of Table V. The pooled estimate of the logit coe cient on sky cover is 0.017, which is close to the mean of the city-by-city estimates. The associated chi-square statistics is 28.86, which indicates that the coe cient estimate is very statistically signi cant.the coe cient estimate for raininess is 0.190, and it is statistically significant.the estimate for snowiness is positive and insigni cant. As in the case without adverse weather controls, the xed-e ects PCSE linear probability model is consistent with the pooled logit model. The coe cient estimate for SKC i;t n is , with an asymptotic z-statistic of 5.01.The coe cient estimate for RAIN n is 0.049, with a z-statistic of 3.06, and the coe cient estimate for SNOW n is positive and insigni cant. Again, even after controlling for other weather conditions, sunshine is strongly signi cantly correlated with both the sign and the magnitude of returns. D. Ability of Sunlight to Predict Returns With the parameter estimates reported in Table III, we now consider the pro tability of trading strategies based upon the sunshine e ect, and whether morning sunlight can predict returns for the day. We use the coe cient of the simple pooled regression, 0.011, as our estimate of the sunshine e ect.the mean daily return across all countries is 0.103, with a standard deviation of We know that the cloudiness variable ranges from zero to eight, so the di erence in expected return between a completely overcast day and a sunny day is or about nine basis points.while nine basis points is approximately how much the markets go up on an average day, it is only about ve percent of the standard deviation of daily returns. Consistent with this calculation, the R 2 of the naive pooled regression reported in Table III is 0.02 percent, a very low number.

18 1026 The Journal of Finance It is, of course, not reasonable to expect the explanatory power of sunshine to be large. Many shocks a ect daily stock returns, such as real news about global, national, and local fundamentals. Unless the market is grotesquely ine cient, fundamental news must have a large e ect on returns. Rather than focusing on R 2, we consider whether a portfolio strategy based on weather trading can signi cantly increase the Sharpe ratio of a hypothetical investor. We employ a Britten-Jones (1999) test of the mean-variance e ciency of a simple global market portfolio, and the global portfolio combined with a weatherbased strategy. The Britten-Jones test regresses a vector of ones on portfolio returns. When more than one set of portfolio returns are used as dependent variables, a mean-variance e cient portfolio will be signi cantly related to the vector of ones and all other portfolios will be unrelated to the vector of ones. The intuition behind the test is that a vector of ones represents the ideal asset returnfthe returns are positive with no variability. Put di erently, the vector of ones represents the returns of an asset with an in nite Sharpe ratio, having a mean of one and a variance of zero.the regression nds the combination of potentially mean-variance e cient portfolios that most closely approximates this ideal asset return. Our global market portfolio is the equal-weighted portfolio of all cities returns in local currencies. To construct our trading strategy returns, we average SKC i,t for each city from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. each morning.we then deseasonalize the morning SKC variable in the same way that we deseasonalize the previous measure of SKC (as described in Section II). Finally, we calculate the equal-weighted average return of cities with positive deseasonalized morning SKC and the equalweighted average return of cities with negative deseasonalized morning SKC. We consider strategies that are long indices with sunny cities, short indices with cloudy cities, and both long the sunny indices and short the cloudy indices. The results of our test appear in TableVI. Table VI shows that in the absence of transaction costs investors can improve their Sharpe ratios by trading on the weather. In the rst model, the returns of the sunny strategy are given almost the same weight in the mean-variance e cient portfolio as the returns of the global market portfolio. The weight on the sunny strategy returns is statistically signi cant, with a t-statistic of In the second model, the mean-variance e cient portfolio is clearly short the cloudy portfolio. The t-statistics of the weight of the cloudy portfolio is The results of the third model are somewhat ambiguous, presumably because of a high degree of multicollinearity in the regression. However, the fourth model again implies that trading on the weather can increase a Sharpe ratio. The strategy of buying the sunny portfolio and selling the cloudy portfolio is clearly a substantial part of the global mean-variance e cient portfolio. E. Accounting for Transaction Costs To determine whether exploiting the sunshine e ect can increase a Sharpe ratio after accounting for reasonable transaction costs, we propose a strategy that requires fewer trades than the strategy described above, and we calculate the

19 Stock Returns and theweather 1027 TableVI Tests of Weather-based Trading Strategies This table displays results of tests of the mean-variance e ciency of a global equity portfolio. The global equity portfolio return is the equal-weighted average of local currency returns of the 26 stock exchanges in the sample. Tests are performed within the framework of Britten-Jones (1999).We estimate regressions of the form 1 ¼ b m r mt þ b s r st þ u t where r mt is the return on the global equity portfolio and r st is the return to a weather-based strategy on day t. The weather-based strategies that we consider are: the sunny strategy, in which we invest an equal amount in each exchange for which morning total sky cover SKC it is negative on day t; the cloudy strategy, in which we invest an equal amount in each exchange for which morning SKC it is positive on day t; and the sunny^cloudy strategy, in which we go long the sunny strategy and short the cloudy strategy. Morning SKC it is measured from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. local time in each city on each day. A statistically signi cant coe cient for a return series in one of our models implies that the return series is an important component of a mean-variance portfolio. The t-statistics are in parentheses. Model (1) Market (2) Sunny (3) Cloudy (4) Sunny^Cloudy (5) Model (2.92) (3.39) Model (7.59) ( 3.22) Model (1.45) (1.24) ( 0.66) Model (10.72) (3.45) returns to our strategy net of costs. In particular, we calculate the returns to a strategy that is long the market index of each city for which the average cloud cover variable between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. is between zero and four, and short the city s index otherwise. Each city for which the strategy stipulates a long position receives a weight of 1/n (where n is the number of cities considered by the strategy) while each city for which the strategy stipulates a short position receives a weight of 1/n. Since the number of cloudy cities varies from day to day, this trading rule requires a positive net investment on some days and a negative net investment on other days. If the trading rule implies that the position in a particular city changes from a long to a short position or from a short to a long position, we subtract transaction costs from the return of the city on that day. After calculating the returns to this strategy for various levels of costs, we ask whether the strategy return should receive positive weight in a mean-variance e cient portfolio using the Britten-Jones test described above. Performing the test with costs of one basis point per transaction (two points for changing a position from long to short or from short to long), the Britten- Jones test assigns a weight of (t ) to the market portfolio and a weight of (t ) to the weather strategy. For comparison, with no transaction costs the Britten-Jones test gives optimal weights of (t ) and 26.07

20 1028 The Journal of Finance (t ) respectively. Increasing the costs to two basis points results in weights of (t ) and (t ), while increasing costs to three basis points results in weights of (t ) and 8.32 (t ). Costs of four basis points are associated with optimal weights of and 2.33, and costs of ve basis points make trading on the sunshine e ect unpro table. Thus, trading on the sunshine e ect could improve the Sharpe ratio of an investor s portfolio only if the costs of index trading were four basis points or less per transaction. Although di erent types of investors may face di erent costs, we can approximate the costs involved in trading one S&P 500 index futures contract with some conservative back-of-the-envelope calculations. The transaction costs associated with trading in the U.S. market are modest, on the order of one basis point per transaction. 7 However, the costs associated with trading other market indices may be signi cantly higher. 8 Thus, trading on the sunshine e ect may have been pro table for very low-cost traders, but it is not at all clear that it was pro table for most investors. IV. Conclusion Psychological evidence and casual intuition predict that sunny weather is associated with upbeat mood. This paper examines the relationship between whether a day is sunny and stock returns that day at 26 stock exchanges internationally from 1982 to 1997.We nd that sunshine is highly signi cantly correlated with daily stock returns. After controlling for sunshine, other weather conditions such as rain and snow are unrelated to returns. An investor with very low transactions costs would have improved on the Sharpe ratio of the market portfolio, though somewhat modestly, by trading on the weather. However, because weather strategies involve frequent trading, fairly modest transaction costs eliminate this bene t. Nevertheless, the sunshine e ect on stock returns is hard to reconcile with fully rational price setting. Well-known patterns of return predictability, such as size and value e ects, have been interpreted by some as indicating market ine ciency. However, others have attempted to rationalize stock price patterns as resulting from risk premia instead of psychological e ects. This study o ers some evidence that is tough to rationalize. The evidence is not a result of data snoopingfthe psychological hypothesis is the stimulus for exploring sunshine e ects.there is no very appealing rational explanation for why a day of sunshine near a country s stock exchange should be associated with high returns on a national market index, nor why 7 Huang and Stoll (1997) nd that brokerage commissions for trading one S&P futures contract are generally less than $25 per contract for institutional clients. Manaster and Mann (1996) nd that the bid^ask spread that S&P 500 futures customers typically pay is $4.33, so we estimate total costs of trading as $30 per contract. Each contract s notional value is $250 times the level of the index, which is currently close to 1,200. Thus, the notional value of one contract is approximately $300,000 and the cost of trading one S&P 500 futures contract as a fraction of the contract s value appears to be approximately one basis point. 8 However, Boudoukh et al. (2000) describe how individuals can trade between some international stock indices and money markets in open-end mutual fund families at essentially zero cost.

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